Fourteen months after being fired by the Wild, Mike Yeo finally got to shake hands with many of his former players.
Unfortunately for the Wild, Yeo was doing so while standing on Xcel Energy Center's ice after advancing to the second round of the playoffs as coach of the St. Louis Blues.
The Wild didn't go quietly Saturday afternoon, but few will remember the Wild's franchise-best regular season now that the team couldn't even get past Game 5 of the first round.
Once again, the effort was there, and other than the first 10 ½ minutes, so was the better play. But in the end, the Wild couldn't complete a third-period comeback from two goals down, losing 4-3 in a season-eliminating overtime.
"What is this, five years in a row? I'm sick of it," said center Erik Haula, who was elevated when Eric Staal sustained a scary-looking head injury in the second period. "We're all sick of it."
A team with Stanley Cup aspirations, one that went 30-6-3 during a three-month stretch, got career-best seasons from several players and scored a franchise-record 266 goals, ended the season with a thud against its former coach, scoring eight goals in the entire series, four at 5-on-5.
The Blues move on to face Nashville. The Wild players head their separate ways. How about that for Minnesota karma?
"It's tough to handle, really. None of us expected this," winger Zach Parise said. "It's going to be a long offseason for sure. We tried to get our way back into the series, but when you're down 3-nothing in the series, you're really asking a lot, not that we quit.